The present war has been engendered by
imperialism. Capitalism has already achieved that highest
stage. Society’s productive forces and the magnitudes of capital have
outgrown the narrow limits of the individual national states. Hence the
striving on the part of the Great Powers to enslave other nations and to
seize colonies as sources of raw material and spheres of investment of
capital. The whole world is merging into a single economic organism; it has
been carved up among a handful of Great Powers. The objective conditions for
socialism have fully matured, and the present war is a war of the
capitalists for privileges and monopolies that might delay the downfall of
capitalism.

The socialists, who seek to liberate labour from the yoke of capital and
who defend the world-wide solidarity of the workers, are struggling against
any kind of oppression and inequality of nations. When the bourgeoisie was a
progressive class, and the overthrow of feudalism, absolutism and oppression
by other nations stood on the historical order of the day, the socialists,
as invariably the most consistent and most resolute of democrats, recognised
“defence of the fatherland” in the meaning implied by those aims,
and in that meaning alone. Today too, should a war of the oppressed nations
against the oppressor Great Powers break out in the east of Europe or in the
colonies, the socialists’ sympathy would be wholly with the
oppressed.

The war of today, however, has been engendered by an entirely different
historical period, in which the bourgeoisie, from a progressive class, has
turned reactionary. With
both groups of belligerents, this war is a war of
slaveholders, and is designed to preserve and extend slavery; it is a war
for the repartitioning of colonies, for the “right” to oppress
other nations, for privileges and monopolies for Great-Power capital, and
for the perpetuation of wage slavery by splitting up the workers of the
different countries and crushing them through reaction. That is why, on the
part of both warring groups, all talk about “defence of the
fatherland” is deception of the people by the bourgeoisie. Neither the
victory of any one group nor a return to the status quo can do
anything either to protect the freedom of most countries in the world from
imperialist oppression by a handful of Great Powers, or to ensure that the
working class keep even its present modest cultural gains. The period of a
relatively peaceful capitalism has passed, never to return. Imperialism has
brought the working class unparalleled intensification of the class
struggle, want, and unemployment, a higher cost of living, and the
strengthening of oppression by the trusts, of militarism, and the political
reactionaries, who are raising their heads in all countries, even the
freest.

In reality, the “defence of the fatherland” slogan in the
present war is tantamount to a defence of the “right” of
one’s “own” national bourgeoisie to oppress other nations;
it is in fact a national liberal-labour policy, an alliance between a
negligible section of the workers and their “own” national
bourgeoisie, against the mass of the proletarians and the
exploited. Socialists who pursue such a policy are in fact chauvinists,
social-chauvinists. The policy of voting for war credits, of joining
governments, of
Burgfrieden,[1]
and the like, is a betrayal of
socialism. Nurtured by the conditions of the “peaceful”, period
which has now come to an end, opportunism has now matured to a degree that
calls for a break with socialism; it has become an open enemy to the
proletariat’s movement for liberation. The working class cannot
achieve its historic aims without waging a most resolute struggle against
both forthright opportunism and social-chauvinism (the majorities in the
Social-Democratic
parties of France, Germany and Austria; Hyndman, the
Fabians and the trade unionists in Britain; Rubanovich, Plekhanov and
Nasha Zarya in Russia, etc.) and the so-called Centre, which has
surrendered the Marxist stand to the chauvinists.

Unanimously adopted by socialists of the entire world in anticipation of
that very kind of war among the Great Powers which has now broken out, the
Basle Manifesto of 1912 distinctly recognised the imperialist and
reactionary nature of that war, declared it criminal for workers of one
country to shoot at workers of another country, and proclaimed the approach
of the proletarian revolution in connection with that very
war. Indeed, the war is creating a revolutionary situation, is engendering
revolutionary sentiments and unrest in the masses, is arousing in the finer
part of the proletariat a realisation of the perniciousness of opportunism,
and is intensifying the struggle against it. The masses’ growing
desire for peace expresses their disappointment, the defeat of the bourgeois
lie regarding the defence of the fatherland, and the awakening of their
revolutionary consciousness. In utilising that temper for their
revolutionary agitation, and not shying away in that agitation from
considerations of the defeat of their “own” country, the
socialists will not deceive the people with the hope that, without the
revolutionary overthrow of the present-day governments, a possibility exists
of a speedy democratic peace, which will be durable in some degree and will
preclude any oppression of nations, a possibility of disarmament, etc. Only
the social revolution of the proletariat opens the way towards peace and
freedom for the nations.

The imperialist war is ushering in the era of the social revolution. All
the objective conditions of recent times have put the proletariat’s
revolutionary mass struggle on the order of the day. It is the duty of
socialists, while making use of every means of the working class’s
legal struggle, to subordinate each and every of those means to this
immediate and most important task, develop the workers’ revolutionary
consciousness, rally them in the international revolutionary struggle,
promote and encourage any revolutionary action, and do everything possible
to
turn the imperialist war between the peoples into a civil war of the
oppressed classes against their oppressors, a war for the expropriation of
the class of capitalists, for the conquest of political power by the
proletariat, and the realisation of socialism.